One of the ideas that didn’t make it into my thesis:
In reading through dystopian scholarship, there is a pervading belief that writing about novels that write about society’s ills somehow makes the world a better place. I’m not saying it doesn’t, but the high-falutin’ rhetoric is a bit much for my taste. Reminds me a bit of Vashti in “The Machine Stops,” where she and her friends spend all their time making and listening to ‘speeches’ in separate rooms.
or of the flappers in Gulliver’s travels
My problem with this rhetoric is it seems to assume that the sheer act of scholarly criticism is affecting the system. Having taught for 3 years as well as worked with students in a Writing Center, I have to say…….. it doesn’t. Most people do not learn very well solely inside abstractions. They need real-world, personal stuff as part of the conversation. Thinking that translating a dystopian novel into a set of shared abstractions will make things better is incredibly near-sighted on several fronts.
1) Marxist jargon is alienating and obtuse. It seems to like being this way. It serves as an unnecessary gate-keeper to important ideas.
2) A set of shared abstractions IS important, but circulating them inside scholarly journals in obtuse language has minimal impact on society.
3) The stories speak for themselves. The stories that have the most impact on people’s thinking are film. If we really care about monitoring stories for their viability as useful stories for the current problems, we should become a louder, more coherent voice responding to film, responding to the incredibly conservative rhetoric of Hollywood.
I also wrote about dystopian fiction because I want to ‘change the world.’ In writing it, in realizing how few people would read it, compared with how many people I interact with, let alone how many people I might interact with, it’s clear that if I really want my reading of some social critique novel to make a difference, it will be in every day conversations, or in my decisions to participate in protests, etc.
I would love to see the rhetoric surrounding dystopian interpretation become more realistic. If scholars do want to talk about how their interpretation helps, I want to see hard data–how are they using it in their teaching? How are they using the ideas in helping the world be a better place in some sort of activist role they are engaged in?
We have to quit pretending through our rhetorical conventions about literature that literature is an aorta. Part of the lifeblood of humanity, the aorta of a fair chunk of humanity, but it is not an aorta.
What goes on in these maps of social hell? 